March 2005 Archives
Items discussed included the following:
1. Mike announced that this evening after 10 p.m., he will force the minimum release of GW 6.5.1 for Agents and County-Agents Post Offices. Any county agent or staff member using an older version of GW will not be able to log in. It will give some error like "post office is invalid or unavailable". This will not affect those people connecting through Internet Explorer or any webAccess See our eit.tamu.edu web page and click on "GroupWise WebAccess". However, the "agit.tamu.edu" website will stop working as of tonight for everyone other than our EIT faculty/staff. Agents and County-Agents Post Offices will be available for agents to use. IMAP4 mode will be turned off at some point later on.
Jeffrey had agents who asked why there are so many WebAccess sites (links) to choose from on our eit.tamu.edu website. Mike said that it is better to have a WebAccess server closest to the post office where the user's e-mail resides. Having one, central WebAccess server would create problems for users whose post office is not on that server because we may have to bring the server down for repairs or upgrades making it impossible to get their mail via the web even though their post office is available and working fine.
In addition, links between the post offices and the central server may be lost from time to time. We need these links for reliability and speed and performance issues. There are times when one server may go down, and the others are needed as backups. We may have as many as 300 users or more on one server.
Mike also mentioned that many WebAccess users are not using the Exit icon when they are finished with their e-mail but just close Internet Explorer. This leaves their session active for 20 minutes until that thread is released to make room for another user to connect. This causes unnecessary open but unused connections on the WebAccess server.
Mike is moving Plant Pathology and Bexar county from GW 5.5 soon. Some people ask why they can’t continue using GW 5.5, but Mike said it does not work well with Windows XP as GW 6.5 does. You can use the 5.5 even though your server is 6.5, but you’ll see weird problems when using it. Philip warned that he has seen some personal email addresses be corrupted during the upgrade such that email address components are switched as a result....i.e. "com.aol" instead of "aol.com". If you see undeliverable messages after a client upgrade, be on the lookout for this kind of behavior. The fix is to delete the address and re-enter it.
Also, GW 6.5.4 was released only about a month ago, so we do not have much in-house experience with it
2. Philip reminded everyone that he and Mike will be attending the 2005 Brainshare conference in Salt Lake City in about 2 weeks. They plan to take a list of questions to ask the ‘experts’ at Novell. If you have any questions regarding GW, Novell, I-Folder, Iprint, etc, please email Philip or Mike with your questions by March 20th.
3. Steve mentioned that he likes his Treo 650. Everyone is impressed when they see his new Treo. Jaroy likes it. Weldon has not received his 650 yet. The Telecom office is charging $382 for the upgrade. Steve said the 650 is smaller, but the screen is clearer, brighter and amazing.
At our monthly Concho Valley Chapter of the Association of Information Technology Professionals luncheon yesterday, we had an analysts from Computer Associates speak about a good resource located on their website. The website URL is http://www3.ca.com/securityadvisor/
The CA advisor website lists the latest alerts for spyware, virus, and product vulnerabilities.
